THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
2002:
May
- May: Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker that Donald Rumsfeld is so determined to find an Iraqi-based rationale for the 9/11 attacks that on ten separate occasions he has asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to the attacks. The intelligence agency repeatedly comes back empty-handed. But while the CIA hasn't been helpful to Rumsfeld, one former senior official later says, "If it became known that [Rumsfeld] wanted [the Defense Intelligence Agency] to link the government of Tonga to 9/11, within a few months they would come up with sources who'd do it." (Guerrilla News Network, Seymour Hersh)
- May: The Bush administration begins a clandestine bombing operation against Iraq. In March, the amount of US bombs dropped on Iraq was zero; in April, the amount was 0.3 tons. Bush orders a tremendous escalation in the bombing of Iraq, which will reach a prewar peak of 54.6 tons by September 2002. The bombing is unprovoked by any Iraqi military attacks or maneuvers. According to the British Foreign Office, it is illegal for either US or British pilots to bomb within the UN-established no-fly zones except to prevent humanitarian crises between the Shi'a and Sunni, or in absolute self-defense. To constitute self-defense, "there must be more than 'a threat.' There has to be an armed attack, actual or imminent. The development or possession of nuclear weapons does not in itself amount to an armed attack; what would be needed would be clear evidence of an imminent attack." In other words, the bombing is entirely illegal. (New Statesman, British Foreign Office/OhMy News)
- The CIA denotes three Iraqi defectors, including the already-notorious "Curveball," as a likely fabricator.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
The CIA's "burn notice" on Curveball and the other two -- all products of Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress -- joins a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment that Curveball is a liar and a fraud. (Frank Rich [PDF file]) - May: A number of sources report progress on both oil and gas pipelines in Central Asia. Unocal will re-emerge as a pipeline contender after withdrawing from the CentGas pipeline project in 1998. Unocal denies plans to revive the gas pipeline, but neglects to mention whether or not it has any interest in the oil pipeline, which local sources say is moving ahead. (Dawn/From the Wilderness)
- May: Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad receives a strange phone call from a man claiming to be a CIA agent in Pittsburgh. Alhaddad is an Iraqi-born American who works as an anesthesiologist in Cleveland after fleeing with her husband from Saddam Hussein's regime in 1979. She confirms that "Chris" is actually a CIA agent by asking a field agent at Cleveland's FBI office, and agrees to meet with the CIA agent, though the meeting does not take place until August due to Alhaddad's need to care for her ailing mother.
- The CIA is desperately searching for evidence to sustain the administration's assertions that Hussein has a large and varied cache of WMDs that makes him an imminent threat to the security of the United States. Over coffee at a local Starbucks, Chris astonishes Alhaddad by asking her to help the effort against Islamist terror. Chris tells Alhaddad that the CIA wants her to go to Baghdad and become a spy. She is chosen because her brother, Saad Tawfiq, is an electrical engineer who the CIA believes is a key member of Hussein's nuclear weapons program. Alhaddad is to try to persuade her brother, whom she has not seen since 1989, to defect from Baghdad through the Kurdish-held zone in northern Iraq. Then the CIA could debrief him about his knowledge of Hussein's nuclear plans and ambitions. Alhaddad agrees to go.
- Alhaddad's recruitment is part of a near-solo effort by the CIA's assistant director for collection, Charlie Allen, an old hand who is trying desperately to patch the agency's huge gaps in intelligence surrounding Iraq's WMDs. Allen has little time to play the lapdog games being performed by CIA director George Tenet and his obsequious senior aides with the powers-that-be in the White House, and wants to find out first-hand just what Hussein does and does not possess. Everyone from Hussein's WMD programs that the CIA has been able to interview claimed, to a man, that those programs had long since been abandoned, but those scientists and officials had defected in the 1990s, and Allen knows their intelligence is stale. All the CIA knows is what the UN weapons inspectors have so far been able to unearth, and that, too, is discouraging. Alhaddad is one of about 30 relatives of Iraqi scientists that agree to go back to Iraq and find out what their relatives know. Alhaddad is of special interest, since her brother Tawfiq is a senior figure in the Iraqi nuclear program.
- Chris, the Pittsburgh CIA agent, helps provide Alhaddad some rudimentary training in espionage, mostly centering on what questions to ask her brother. She can't just write everything down -- it wouldn't do for Hussein's border agents to find a memo from the CIA on her -- and the CIA's techniques of using invisible ink are cumbersome and dangerous, so she relies on her own memory and a clever incorporation of information inside crossword puzzles. Through her mother-in-law, Alhaddad sets up a meeting with her brother in Baghdad. She flies to Baghdad without incident, and meets with Tawfiq at the airport. Tawfiq helps her get through security, and soon they arrive at the family home, the site of which depresses Alhaddad -- like the entire city of Baghdad, from what she can see, her home is far more dilapidated than she remembers it to have been. Unfortunately their house is also next door to the local headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Hussein's feared intelligence service.
- Two nights later, she takes a stroll with Tawfiq and begins asking him the CIA's questions. Tawfiq joined the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission in 1981, mostly to avoid military service. Tawfiq worked closely on a nuclear energy reactor in Tuwaitha, which Hussein hoped would one day provide vast amounts of energy for his nation as well as processing weapons-grade uranium for the creation of an atomic bomb. The day before Tawfiq was to report to work, the Israelis bombed the Tuwaitha reactor, known to the outside world as the Osirik reactor. The announcement of Israel's Menachem Begin that the Israelis had bombed the plant to prevent Iraq from developing a nuclear bomb was the first notice that Tawfiq received that the nuclear plant might be for weapons development as well. The Iraqis began rebuilding their nuclear weapons development process, using an outdated and exceedingly slow, but effective, process used in 1944 by the Americans of the Manhattan Project, called EMIS, that could, in time, produce weapons-grade uranium without the use of a nuclear reactor. (So much information on EMIS was available publicly that a senior team member gathered critically valuable information on the process from sources in American libraries.) Tawfiq eventually became one of the EMIS project's senior managers. Interestingly, the EMIS program, which began producing small amounts of uranium from phosphate mines in the Iraqi region of Akashat, proves that Iraq would never have needed to buy uranium from Niger, as is currently being alleged by Bush officials. Tawfiq himself later says that the information those allegations were based on "did not come from anyone in Iraq who knew anything."
- Heightened pressure from Hussein to produce more uranium, the attempted purchase of American nuclear triggers on the black market (leading to arrests of Iraqis at Heathrow Airport), and the 1991 Persian Gulf War destroyed the EMIS program. The program's director, Hussein Kamel, was putting incredible pressure on the EMIS team to produce in the weeks leading up to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, even though the program was 2-3 years away from being able to produce a real bomb. The Americans destroyed the program by sheer accident when an air strike takes out a secondary target in Tarmiya, just north of Baghdad, that the US believed, wrongly, was part of the Iraqi Military Industrialization Commission. Subsequent satellite photos showed an intriguing amount of activity at the site, and a B-52 carpet bombing strike destroyed it entirely. After the war, Hussein spent a lot of time and effort attempting to mislead US and UN weapons inspectors about his former nuclear program, meanwhile instructing the program leaders to destroy all evidence that such a program ever existed. The IAEA soon found out that something interesting was going on, Kamel changed his orders from "hide" to "don't hide" and back again, and in August 1991 the UN inspectors were shown the hastily loaded tractor-trailers full of equipment and documents. The inspectors' discovery of the program's remnants concluded any hopes that the program could ever be revivified. "The program was finished and we had no purpose in life," Tawfiq later recalls.
- Kamel defected in 1995, gave tremendous amounts of intelligence to the Americans, then re-entered Iraq and was executed. When Tawfiq's sister comes to Baghdad to discuss the Iraqi nuclear program with him for the CIA, he is working on a program to develop a nitric acid plant for fertilizer production. He isn't working on a nuclear program, because Iraq's nuclear program has been dead for over a decade.
- Tawfiq is incredulous that the CIA is so keenly interested in a program that they know, or ought to know, has been dead for eleven years. He is just as stunned to learn that the CIA wants him to defect through the Kurdish zone, and knows he cannot just leave. The CIA hasn't offered him any assistance in defecting, and getting through Hussein's security will be impossible for him. The list of questions from the CIA astonishes Tawfiq. "Where did they come up with these questions," he asks. "Don't they know there is no more nuclear program?" Alhaddad later recalls being shocked at the revelation. The CIA had insisted that there is a large clandestine nuclear weapons operation going on, and her brother is at the center of it. "He just kept saying there is nothing," she later says. Tawfiq tells her that even if the Iraqis wanted to build a new program, they have nothing with which to build it. The military lacks critical equipment to repair its own tanks and trucks. The Iraqis can't even shoot down airplanes. If the sanctions are ever lifted, Hussein may well start the program up again, but right now there is absolutely nothing.
- Tawfiq begins to think that, with his knowledge that Hussein has no weapons -- nuclear, chemical, or biological -- that once the CIA finds out what he knows, the war by the Americans will be called off. The country was devastated by the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the Persian Gulf War of 1991; he doesn't believe it can survive a third one, especially one not prompted by any good reason. During their last clandestine discussion, Alhaddad asks him about an Iraqi defector who is claiming that Iraq has WMD programs. Tawfiq is dismissive, saying he knows the man in question, that the man is a fraud and never knew anything, and just wants money. Tawfiq puts his sister back on a plane to the US, having decided not to risk defection. Alhaddad will have to tell the CIA that there are no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
- Alhaddad tells her CIA debriefing team everything her brother had shared with her. The nuclear weapons program is long gone, and the Iraqis have nothing with which to restart it. The Iraqi defector that says differently is a liar who just wants to get rich. Iraq never attempted to purchase uranium from Niger or anywhere else. Tawfiq was puzzled as to the source of the CIA's crazy questions. Later, she finds that Chris, the CIA agent from Pittsburgh, told her husband that the CIA believes Tawfiq lied to his sister. "We think he knows muchmore than he is willing to tell her." The husband replies that the idea makes little sense: "Why would he lie? What does he have to gain from it? You wanted him to defect, but he said there was no program to talk to you about?"
- All thirty of Alhaddad's comrades in familial espionage will return from Iraq with the same intelligence -- no weapons, no prospect of weapons. Charlie Allen's intelligence-gathering program had turned up a great deal of information, all negative. So the CIA ignores it. None of the reports are disseminated to senior policy makers in the Bush administration, and Bush never hears of them. Some CIA officials say that part of the problem, besides the fact that administration officials don't want to hear the negative information, is that the CIA's Directorate of Operations, which runs all of its clandestine operations, is jealous and angry of Allen's "rogue" operation, and takes its revenge by denigrating the results and shutting down the program. The Directorate of Intelligence, in charge of analysis, shelves the reports without ever examining them. New York Times reporter James Risen writes, "The CIA had obtained hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had abandoned his efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction -- and the agency chose not to share that information with the president of the United States, who was about to send American troops to fight and die in Iraq. Sawsan [Alhaddad]'s dangerous trip into the heart of Saddam Hussein's Iraq had been for nothing. Saad Tawfiq's desperate hope that his sister could carry a message back to the CIA that might prevent a war was dashed by the petty turf battles and tunnel vision of the agency's officials." A month after Alhaddad's return to America, the US intelligence community releases a secret National Intelligence Estimate that claims Iraq "is reconstituting its nuclear program."
- In February 2003, Tawfiq watches Colin Powell's tremendously fraudulent address to the United Nations, in which Powell asserts all kinds of "factual" claims about the Iraqi WMDs that don't exist. Tawfiq thinks miserably, "They didn't listen. I told them there were no weapons." (James Risen)
- May: Bush gives the Department of Energy the right to classify any information it likes as "secret." (Stephen Pizzo/Daily Misleader)
- May: The Bush administration redefines the term "fill material" to allow mining companies who blow the tops off of mountains to get at the coal and minerals within to dump the massive debris (fill material) from the operations into formerly protected valleys and riverbeds. Mountaintop-removal mining is one of the most environmentally destructive practices known to man; the Clean Air Act has forbidden the dumping of such debris in valleys and riverbeds for 25 years. Already the practice is responsible for destroying thousands of streams in and around the Appalachian Mountains; the dumping of debris will allow silt and toxins to filter into drinking water sources hundreds of miles away. Bush claims his decision is to keep West Virginia coal mining companies from going bankrupt; the more pertinent reason seems to be that these selfsame companies contributed $3.6 million to Republicans in 2000 and 2002, and West Virginia was a key "swing state" that went narrowly for Bush in the 2000 presidential elections. Along with the decision, the EPA quietly relaxes rules restricting Western mining companies from doing what was defined as "substantial irreparable harm" to a given area's environment. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
- May: Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson takes part in a UN session on children. During the meetings, Thompson and the US join Syria, Libya and Iraq in fighting against sex education for adolescents. Along with the Vatican, the US opposes contraceptive instruction for married couples and abortion as a part of UN reproductive health services. The US even manages to block a consensus agreement against state executions of minors, and objects to services being provided for children injured and traumatized during wars and armed conflicts (the US delegates are afraid that girls who have been raped might be offered abortions or emergency contraception). (Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose)
- May 1: During a press conference, press secretary Ari Fleischer engages in what he considers "banter" with UPI reporter Helen Thomas, who attempts to grill him on "the president's rationale for invading Iraq" and why Saddam Hussein is different from other dictators and why his regime warrants an invasion. Fleischer cites the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, pointing out that "regime change" in Iraq has been governmental policy since that time. Unsatisfied, Thomas presses for more specifics, noting that nothing in the legislation mandates any use of military force, and Fleischer says that Bush "believes that the people of Iraq, as well as the region, will be more powerful, better off without Saddam Hussein." "That's not a reason" to go to war, Thomas retorts, and Fleischer gets a laugh from the other reporters by riposting, "Well, Helen, if you were the president, you could have vetoed the law."
- Bush does not find the joust with Thomas amusing. In a meeting with Fleischer and another White House communications staffer, Adam Levine, Bush, out of nowhere, crudely snaps, "Did you tell her I don't like motherf*ckers who gas their own people? Did you tell her I don't like *ssholes who lie to the world? Did you tell her I'm going to kick his sorry motherf*cking *ss all over the Mideast?" Taken aback, Fleischer responds, "I told her half of that." Bush laughs, but Levine thinks to himself, "You know where we're going here." (Isikoff and Corn, Booman Tribune)
- May 2: Bush announces the formation of the Social Security Commission, tasked with revamping the huge entitlement program. Every single member of the commission has been personally approved by Karl Rove and economic advisor Larry Lindsey to ensure that they are all staunch supporters of privatization. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who with his friend Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve, has had as a pet project the restructuring of Social Security, strenuously objects to the exclusion of other viewpoints, recalling, "It meant we gave away our most valuable asset, credibility. If you're certain you're right -- and I think we are [right] on the private accounts -- you shouldn't be afraid to include the opposing voices at your table. If you can't convince them, there may be more facts you have to gather, or something you're not thinking clearly about. In this case, we should have been confident enough to engage the other side." Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle calls the commission "a stacked, completely orchestrated effort to come to a desired result, and I'm very disappointed that this is the decision they've made." (Ron Suskind)
- May 5: In a private meeting with Republican senators in March, Vice President Cheney tells them, "The question was no longer if the US would attack Iraq. The only question was when." Note that at this time, the Bush administration is publicly saying it is committed to finding a peaceful alternative to invading Iraq. (Time/Doug Long)
Robert Hanssen found guilty of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia
- May 10: Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen is found guilty of spying for the USSR and Russia. Hanssen spied for the USSR, and later Russia, for a 15-year period, and apparently decided to be a Soviet mole even before joining the FBI. In 1979 he outed General Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov as an American spy; during his time as a Soviet spy, he outed numerous other American sources, and revealed to the Soviets an extensive tunnel dug under the Soviet embassy for purposes of eavesdropping. Hanssen was a key source in the FBI for the Reagan-era spying on American peace organizations and other liberal groups, and took part in the Reagan administration's orchestrated harassment of such groups. Hanssen was also the source for a 1997 Robert Novak column accusing then-Attorney General Janet Reno of covering up 1996 campaign finance improprieties. Hanssen, a member of the conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei and a fan of Internet pornography, pleads guilty to avoid the death penalty, and is sentenced to life in prison. (Wikipedia)
- May 13: Afghanistan is ready to close a deal for construction of the $2 billion gas pipeline to run from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India. The BBC article states, "work on the project will start after an agreement is expected to be struck" at a summit scheduled for the end of the month. Unocal will build the pipeline. (BBC/From the Wilderness)
- May 13: Bush signs a huge ($190 billion) farm subsidy bill that protects farmers from the vagaries of the free market and especially protects large corporate farmers, who will receive approximately 80% of the subsidies. Journalist Paul Waldman writes, "One of the things the farm bill showed is that while Republican officeholders pose as small-government fiscal conservatives, in fact they are just as friendly towards government as Democrats -- as long as government benefits them and their agenda." (CNN, Paul Waldman)
- May 14: After an extensive review of the US's sanctions against Iraq, the United Nations decides to revamp its own sanctions, allowing more civilian goods into the country while further restraining military and dual-use material. The new "smart sanctions" pushed for by the Bush administration supposedly can be dropped at any time if Saddam Hussein will accept UN demands for a renewal of UN inspections of weapons production plants. Unfortunately, as US officials later acknowledge, the American plan is to make so many demands of Hussein that he will refuse to comply; for example, the US demand for Hussein to open up all of his palaces to inspection is virtually meaningless in a military sense, but is calculated to give maximum offense to Hussein. The strategy works. Hussein resists pleas from European countries such as France to let the UN perform their inspections and "not give the United States an excuse to bomb." The driving reason behind this, of course, is money -- as Seymour Hersh writes, "some of the most ardent advocates of the war against Iraq were also the most eager to profit from it." (FactMonster, Seymour Hersh)
- May 16: White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer states that while President Bush had been warned of possible hijackings, "The president did not -- not -- receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers." And National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice tells the press, "The overwhelming bulk of the evidence was that this was an attack that was likely to take place overseas." Rice is one of the few administration officials to have read the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing entitled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." (CBS/From the Wilderness, Asia Times)
- May 17: When asked about what intelligence warnings the Bush administration may have had before 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney says, "What I want to say to my Democratic friends in the Congress is they need to be very cautious not to seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions as were made by some today that the White House had advance information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9/11. Such commentary is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war." Democratic Representative Richard Gephardt responds, "We have a duty and a responsibility to keep the American people safe. Obviously that didn't happen on September the 11th. We've got to do better in the future. And with this information, finding out what happened at the CIA, at the FBI, in the White House, maybe we can do a better job in the future." Press secretary Ari Fleischer's response to such questioning is particularly telling: when asked about a widely-circulated report that includes the statement, "[S]uicide bombers belonging to al-Qaida's martyrdom battalion could crash-land in aircraft packed with high explosives into the pentagon, CIA Headquarters, or the White House," Fleischer responds, "This document was described...it is not a piece of intelligence information suggesting that we have information about a specific plan or that they are going to. It describes... the title of report, if I recall, is "the psychology and the sociology of terrorists." The reporter bores in, saying, "This is pre-9/11 material. Nobody, either in the President's CIA briefings or in a principal committee, said, 'you know what? These lunatics have talked about flying planes into buildings.'" Fleischer attempts to shift the blame of not knowing off of the Bush administration and onto the Clinton administration and to Congress by saying, "This report from 1999 about the thinking, the psychology of terrorism, was available in 1999 to members of Congress, the previous administration. It existed in some form, which did not come to the attention of this administration when we took office on January 20." Subseqent investigation proves that Fleischer's statements are flat lies. (PBS)
- May 19: US government sources confirm that Bush was given specific and detailed warnings about the 9/11 attacks on August 6, 2001. In a top-secret intelligence memo headlined 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US', Bush was told that Osama bin Laden hoped to 'bring the fight to America' in retaliation for missile strikes on al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in 1998. Bush officials deny that they knew anything other than there was the general possibility of a terrorist attack somewhere, but insist they had no information that the attack or attacks might take place on US soil. Officials admitted four days earlier that Bush was informed that bin Laden wanted to hijack airplanes; administration officials strenuously deny that anyone thought the aircraft hijackings might play a part in such attacks. "It is widely known that we had information that bin Laden wanted to attack the United States or United States interests abroad," says press secretary Ari Fleischer. "The president was also provided information about bin Laden wanting to engage in hijacking in the traditional pre-9/11 sense, not for the use of suicide bombing, not for the use of an airplane as a missile." The memo received by Bush on August 6 contained unconfirmed information passed on by British intelligence in 1998 revealing that al-Qaeda operatives had discussed hijacking a plane to negotiate the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the Muslim cleric imprisoned in America for his part in a plot to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. Bush was on vacation at his "ranch" in Crawford on August 6; after the briefing, which reportedly failed to catch his interest, he spent the rest of the afternoon fishing. (Guardian, New York Times/AFPN)
- May 19: On NBC's Meet the Press, one of his favorite venues for spreading disinformation, Vice President Dick Cheney once again makes false, blanket assertions about Iraq's capabilities and possession of WMDs. "We know he's got chemicals and biological [weapons]," Cheney says. "[W]e know he's working on nuclear." Actually, US intelligence knows nothing of the sort, and indications are strong that Hussein has no WMDs whatsoever. When Cheney's claims are later completely disproven, he will deny making any of these claims. (NBC/Bush on Iraq, Frank Rich [PDF file])
- May 19: Cheney says he has advised President Bush not to turn over to Congress the August 2001 intelligence briefing that warned that terrorists were interested in hijacking airplanes. He also insists that the investigation into Sept. 11 should be handled by the Congressional intelligence committees, not an independent commission. "...[T]his administration, as I found in some of my other work in Congress, has a real penchant for secrecy," responded Senator Joseph Lieberman. "I found that in the investigation my committee is doing of Enron, where I think we're asking for some very reasonable information. And the White House has so far stonewalled us." The administration claims that it wants to keep personal conversations and exchanges private; Rep. Henry Waxman points out, "some of these staffers when they worked on the Hill had no concern about asking about the private conversations of President Clinton and his staff or his attorney general and her staff." (CCR)
- May 20: After months of negotiations and political maneuverings, East Timor officially wins its independence from Indonesia. Newly elected president Xanana Gusmao takes office. A UN peacekeeping force remains on the island to protect the fledgling government and the populace from Indonesian depredations. (BBC/East Timor Timeline )
- May 20-24: The Bush administration issues a remarkable series of terror warnings that many believe are politically motivated. Vice President Cheney warns it is "not a matter of if, but when" al-Qaeda will next attack the US. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge says the same thing. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says terrorists will "inevitably" obtain weapons of mass destruction. FBI Director Robert Mueller says more suicide bombings are "inevitable." Mueller and other authorities also issue warnings that al-Qaeda terrorists might target apartment buildings nationwide, banks, rail and transit systems, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as warning of possible attacks by terrorist scuba divers. Donald Rumsfeld piles on, saying that terrorists will "inevitably obtain weapons of mass destruction, probably from Iraq" -- scoring a double by tying Iraq to the terror scares. USA Today titles an article, "Some Question Motives Behind Series of Alerts." David Martin, CBS's national security correspondent, says, "Right now they're putting out all these warnings to change the subject from what was known prior to September 11 to what is known now." Press Secretary Ari Fleischer eventually admits the alerts were issued "as a result of all the controversy that took place last week." Time notes, "Though uncorroborated and vague, the terror alerts were a political godsend for an Administration trying to fend off a bruising bipartisan inquiry into its handling of the terrorist chatter last summer. After the wave of warnings, the Democratic clamor for an investigation into the government's mistakes subsided."
- Columnist and author Frank Rich later writes that the terror alerts were planned to counter the revelations of pre-9/11 failures, including FBI agent Coleen Rowley's May 21 assertion that FBI officials in Washington had prevented her office from investigating accused 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, and related stories of blocked FBI investigations in Phoenix and Minneapolis. (See the 9/11 pages of this site for further information.) Cheney tells a fawning Larry King that no one in the White House would ever dream of trying to distract Americans from the news of pre-9/11 governmental ignorance by issuing a raft of bogus terror alerts. But at no time does the Homeland Security terror alert warning system ever rise from yellow to orange. (CCR, Mother Jones, Frank Rich pp.48-9)
- May 21: General Tommy Franks tells reporters that he is unable to answer any questions about any plans to invade Iraq because "my boss has not yet asked me to put together a plan to do that." In reality, Franks and his staff have been working on invasion plans since November 2001. (Mother Jones)
- May 22: Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, the owner of the conservative Washington Times, announces that a heavenly meeting was held on Christmas 2001 under the auspices of God himself. In the meeting, attended by Jesus Christ, Muhammed, Confucius, and Buddha, Jesus named Moon as the next Messiah, and all in attendance agreed. Moon makes his announcement during the 20th anniversary gala celebrating the Times, a bash attended by rafts of Republican officials and marked by a message from George H.W. Bush, a longtime Moon supporter, praising the Times as a "distinguished source of information and opinion...a credit to journalism." (New York Times/Paul Waldman)
- May 23: President Bush states his opposition to the creation of a special, independent commission to probe how the government dealt with terror warnings before 9/11. He will later change his stance in the face of overwhelming support for the idea, but then sabotage an agreement that Congress had reached to establish the commission. (CCR)
- May 24: The US and Russia sign the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or SORT, limiting the two countries to the deployment of no more than 2,000 nuclear warheads. Under the START II extension, both countries will soon be limited to a similar number of warheads as well as completely eliminating all delivery systems, but Bush, unbeknownst to Putin, intends to withdraw from START II, a decision he makes in June. (Arms Control Association, Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose)
- May 24: Republican senator Jim Jeffords switches party affiliations to "independent," and announces he will caucus with Senate Democrats, giving control of the Senate to the Democrats. Privately Jeffords, a moderate Republican from Vermont, says he is sick of being "battered and disrespected" by White House officials, whose extremist conservative agenda offends him and who refuse to acknowledge his own more centrist views. Jeffords is immediately smeared as the worst kind of traitor by conservatives in government and the media. Democrats will control the Senate with a 51-49 split until 2002, when Republicans will take back control of the chamber. (Wikipedia, Ron Suskind)
- May 27: Bush arrives in the Senate's Mansfield Room for what is supposed to be a quick, pro forma meeting with Senate Republicans before a ceremony honoring Nancy Reagan in the Capital Rotunda. However, Bush, who is angered by just-released reports that indicate he had general foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, launches a diatribe that shakes up its listeners. Newsweek's Howard Fineman, who has often written fawning profiles of Bush and his administration, writes that Bush delivers "a jut-jawed, disjointed discourse with a tinge of diatribe and a crescendo of podium pounding." Veering from subject to subject, hands shaking and his ire steadily mounting, Bush saves his most emotional ranting for North Korea's Kim Jong-il. "He's starving his own people!" Bush shouts, and claims that North Korea is imprisoning intellectuals "in a gulag the size of Houston." He calls Kim "a pygmy" and compares him to "a spoiled child at a dinner table." Even his Republican backers are stunned by Bush's near-hysteria. "Nobody dared look at anybody else," says one senator. Bush's anger at North Korea's deliberate starving of its own citizens is laudable but odd, considering that, except for photo ops, he's never shown the slightest iota of interest in any starving people anywhere. If he feels so strongly about North Korea's famine (certainly being used to advantage by Kim, but caused by a variety of factors both environmental and political), then we await his indignant outrage about the famine sweeping through much of Africa. The episode tells us more about Bush and his internal demons than anything else. (Mark Crispin Miller)
- May 27: A request to reclassify US Navy pilot Michael Scott Speicher, shot down in his F-18 Hornet during the first night of the Persian Gulf War on January 17, 1991, as a prisoner of war (POW) instead of missing in action (MIA) is made by Republican Senator Pat Roberts. The request causes tensions between senior Defense Deparment officials, with Undersecretary Douglas Feith opposing the request and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz countermanding Feith's denial. Democratic Senator Bill Nelson insists on a firsthand exploration of the evidence by an investigative team sent to Iraq (Iraq has issued a standing invitation for any investigators to come and inspect their records and the crash site), saying: "The US military has a creed among pilots that when you have to punch out, you are going to have a rescue team that will come get you. ...Against all odds, they will come, try to find you and get you out alive. This awful question hangs over the Commander Scott Speicher case that we abandoned him." No search-and-rescue missions were ever launched to find Speicher or to determine his fate, and few, if any, questions were even asked about his disappearance. Strong evidence has existed for years that Speicher survived the crash of his plane and was almost immediately captured by Iraqi forces. In 1991, based on preliminary evidence, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney declared Speicher to be dead. The DoD decided that Speicher had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile and must have died in the explosion; Speicher's colleague Spock Anderson, who accompanied Speicher on the mission, insisted that Speicher was shot down by an Iraqi MiG fighter plane. Last year the CIA determined that Speicher's plane was indeed shot down by an air-to-air missile, and the decade-old coverup of evidence in the shootdown was first revealed. Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University who reviewed the shootdown, concludes that the Pentagon "got caught up in a cover-up of his death" while pushing to get Congress to upgrade the F-18 Hornets. "The Pentagon played down that an Iraqi MiG shot down the plane because the F-18 was up for a valuable contract renewal. ...They would not want it out that a MiG shot down that plane." The contract was renewed. Later in the year, Saddam Hussein declared that Speicher was dead and his body "devoured by wolves." Admiral Mike Boorda, then Chief of Naval Operations, signed off on a letter declaring Speicher "killed in action" in May 1991, ending any further inquiries into Speicher's death.
- In 1993, a Qatari hunting party found Speicher's plane in the Iraqi desert, with its engines intact, making it unlikely that the account of Speicher's death in a fiery explosion was true. The hunting party took photographs of the find. The ejection seat and canopy, or the bubble that covers the cockpit, were found intact a mile away. And a pilot's flight suit was found abandoned near the canopy, cut, burned, and bearing small traces of what appeared to be blood. A review of satellite photos by the Pentagon shows Speicher's downed plane and a hand-drawn signal in the sand indicating that Speicher had fled. Pentagon officials decided that Speicher couldn't have survived for long, and did not tell Speicher's family of their discovery. When Speicher was shot down, his wife was told "everything had been done," says family attorney Cindy Lacquidara. "They were continuing to search." In 1991 the family was given this message: "All -- repeat: all -- theater combat search-and-rescue efforts were being mobilized." But in fact "there was no search," Lacquidara says. "They dropped the ball. A number of people did." Pat Roberts observes: "It's outrageous we told her there was a search. We left somebody behind! He has got to be out there wondering when on Earth his country is going to come and get him. I'm not saying there was a cover-up, but there is considerable embarrassment to the government. Our U.S. intelligence analysts showed clearly that he survived the crash. I believe he survived the crash, was hospitalized and taken to prison."
- The Clinton administration began talks with the Iraqis and the International Red Cross to open the crash site to US investigators; the Iraqis finally gave permission for an investigation in December 1995. Early reports from the investigation indicated that no evidence of Speicher's survival had been found, according to Republican Senator Robert Smith. Smith also received reports from the Pentagon's Inspector General and the General Accounting Office, praising the intelligence agencies' role regarding Speicher. Weeks later, Smith began to hear very different information. He soon verified both that there was no search for Speicher when he was shot down in 1991 and that there was evidence in hand that he had survived. "I was misled," he says. "I was lied to. There are people whose heads should roll for lying to Congress, lying to me. But this isn't about me. The issue is let's bring him home, let's get the answers." Information leaked to Smith from classified reports about the crash site indicate that Speicher did indeed survive the crash and had been able to leave the scene under his own power; indications were also strong that the site had been previouosly studied.
- In 1996, Congress was partially briefed on the Speicher case, with just enough information to support another Navy claim that Speicher died in the crash. When the case was closed again, Smith, and later Roberts, began pressing to have Speicher's status changed from "KIA" to "MIA." The Pentagon began tarring Smith as a "troublemaker." Smith now says, "The intelligence community trashed me" for poking around the Speicher case. ...They told me it was 'unfortunate' and asked what 'relevance' is it that he is alive or not? What relevance?! America should not give up. We should leave no soldier behind. Period! We should do our best whether he is dead or alive." After a December 1997 New York Times article about the Speicher case, Republican Senator Richard Shelby opened a probe into the entire case, ordering the CIA to release sensitive files to his Select Committee on Intelligence. While the probe was underway, in 1999 an Iraqi defector told the committee that in 1991 he had driven Speicher from the crash site to a hospital. His story was verified. On January 11, 2001, Speicher was reclassified as missing in action. Then-president Clinton issued the following statement: "We have some information that leads us to believe he might be alive. And we hope and pray that he is. But we have already begun working to try to determine whether in fact he's alive; if he is, where he is; and how we can get him out. ...All I want to say is we have evidence which convinced me that we can't ensure that he perished. I don't want to hold out false hope, but I thought it was wrong to continue to classify him as killed in action when he might not have been." Both the CIA and DIA have British intelligence reports indicating that Speicher may be held in a prison where he is regularly visited by Iraqi intelligence, though Britain denies the report.
- Is Speicher still alive? Possibly, but Professor Miller doubts it. Instead, he and others believe the current Bush administration is using the Speicher case to gain sympathy for an invasion of Iraq. "I fully understand the emotional desire by Speicher's comrades and loved ones to find him if he's alive," Miller says. "But I still don't think there is any reason he survived that encounter. Why is all this coming up 10 years after the fact? You have to be naïve to think it is unrelated to the large, ambitious, war drive that the government is now carrying out for a new invasion of Iraq." Roberts reacts violently to the charge, snapping, "That's bullsh*t. Those charges are really out of line. They better not say that to my face." Miller responds, "I'm not saying it isn't true. Truth can be used as propaganda." (Insight Magazine)
- May 28: NATO and Russia sign a broad agreement pledging cooperation in fighting terrorism and preventing weapons of mass destruction from finding their way into terrorist hands. (NATO and UN History)
- May 30: Afghanistan's interim leader, Hamid Karzai, Turkmenistan's President Niyazov, and Pakistani President Musharraf meet in Islamabad to sign a memorandum of understanding on the trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline project. The three leaders will meet for more talks on the project in October. (NewsBase/From the Wilderness, CCR)
- May 30: An Alternet profile of John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Disarmament Affairs and International Security, reveals a great deal about one of the main neoconservative hawks responsible for the current administration's foreign policy and, in 2005, the Bush nominee for the US's ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton, a protege of former GOP senator Jesse Helms, is widely known for his contempt for the UN and for other countries in general. "[T]here is no such thing as the United Nations," he said in 1994, while vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, "if the UN Secretariat building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." (Bolton's hatred of the UN didn't stop him from pocketing $30,000 from Taiwan to advise them on becoming a member of that body.) Bolton was brought in to the State Department fresh from helping the Bush election campaign block the recount of votes in Florida, and foisted on Secretary Colin Powell, who holds much different beliefs about the US role in the world than Bolton; while Powell seems to think that treaties and allies should be taken seriously, Bolton subscribes to the Bush doctrine. The US should "recognize obligations only when it's in our interest," he says. He told a conference that in international operations there are simply "political obligations," presumably to be ignored when inexpedient. And as for allies, he declared that "the Europeans can be sure that America's days as a well-bred doormat for EU political and military protections are coming to an end." Senator Byron Dorgan, who vigorously opposed Bolton's nomination, made a remarkably prescient statement at his confirmation hearing: "To nominate Mr. John Bolton to be Under Secretary of State for Arms Control defies logic. The answer from the President, it seems to me, in sending this nomination to the Senate is no; we don't intend to lead on anything. We intend to do our own thing notwithstanding what anybody else thinks about it, and notwithstanding the consequences."
- Bolton is an active proponent of Star Wars, and when the Senate voted not to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), he gloated "CTBT is dead." And although polls show that more nearly 80 percent of Americans support a ban on all underground tests, Bolton mocked supporters of the test-ban treaty as "misguided individuals following a timid and neo-pacifist line of thought." In an interview with Arms Control magazine after taking office, Bolton caused a stir by seeming to back off the "no first use" policy of that has been the underpinning of the non-proliferation nuclear treaty. He is an active proponent of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and has had the CIA investigate Hans Blix, the former head of the Atomic Agency who is now head of UNMOVIC, the UN weapons inspection team. He was reportedly very angry when the agency could find no evidence of backsliding by Blix. Bolton led a successful three-month battle to overthrow Jose Bustani, the newly re-elected head of Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, who was deposed in April for trying to get Iraq to sign the Convention on Chemical Weapons. Bolton is widely regarded as a unilateralist and a proponent of the PNAC's "Pax Americana" plan for global economic and military domination. (Alternet)
- May 31: FBI Agent Robert Wright holds a press conference describing his lawsuit against the FBI for deliberately curtailing investigations that might have prevented the 9-11 attacks. He uses words like "prevented," "thwarted," "obstructed," "threatened," "intimidated," and "retaliation" to describe the actions of his superiors in blocking his attempts to shut off money flows to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. (C-SPAN/From the Wilderness, CCR)
- Late May: Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill returns from a ten-day trip to West Africa, accompanied by, among others, U2's Bono, who surprises O'Neill with his knowledge and level of commitment towards bringing help to the poverty-stricken, water-starved, and AIDS-ravaged region. O'Neill comes back afire with ideas for helping the people in the region by helping them build simple, cost-effective water- and electricity-production facilities. O'Neill believes the modest sum of $25 million would begin to work wonders in the area he visited, as a start, and would go far to convince the world that the US, regarded as stingy and uncaring about such issues since Bush took office in January 2001, actually would extend help where needed. A further visit by O'Neill and others to Central Africa further energizes O'Neill. But O'Neill has offended senior White House officials by speaking "off-message" to reporters about what, specifically, the US could and should do for the region's inhabitants. He holds a meeting with national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, who is noncommital, and another with Secretary of State Colin Powell, who laughingly tells O'Neill, "You can certainly stir things up, just like always...." The Washington Post alarms the White House by writing of O'Neill's Africa trip, "O'Neill is using words that could haunt the administration if not followed by action, vowing that problems such as the lack of clean water will be addressed promptly." Meanwhile, O'Neill's statements are treated with caution by aid and development groups such as Oxfam and the World Bank, who have decades of experience in the blighted areas of Africa, saying that the water issues are more complex than O'Neill realizes, but O'Neill regards much of these cautionary remarks as little more than "excuses" for inaction.
- O'Neill requests a meeting on the matter with Bush. Instead of getting support, he receives a memo telling him to be careful what information he "leaks" to the press about his ideas, and to not even send documentation to Bush himself -- not just because of the potential that the information will find its way into the hands of the press and "upset the adminstration's legislative strategies," but, as O'Neill knows even though the memo does not say so, that Bush will not bother to read it. Such memos advising "discretion" are not new to O'Neill; the year before, he had snarled to his chief of staff, Michele Davis, "I'll be g*ddamned if I'm going to stop writing memos to the president because some b*stard at the White House is trying to leak me into extinction. ...[Bush] should have the opportunity to see coherent thoughts on paper" even if he chose not to read any of them. On June 10, O'Neill attends a conference with Bush and several other officials; Bush greets him by saying, without smiling, "You know something? You're getting quite a reputation as a truth-teller. You've got yourself a real cult following, don't ya?" O'Neill's ideas get no serious discussion, and he realizes that his days in the administration are numbered.
- During a June 12 one-on-one meeting with Bush, O'Neill launches directly into a plea for $25 million to be allocated to pilot projects for clean water provisions in Ghana that would "demonstrat[e] our values as Americans, and our ingenuity, and that this can be done for a reasonable cost and it can be done fast. You don't have to leave another generation to the vagaries of whether it rains or not, for Christ's sake!" Bush looks bored with the entire subject, and stares blankly at -- or through -- O'Neill. Bush is similarly uninterested in any projects to combat AIDS in Africa.
- Bush does show some interest in O'Neill's last proposal, for an economic conference to discuss Bush's tax cut policies. O'Neill tells Bush of the conference he organized in 1974 for the Ford administration, which brought labor leaders, economists, and CEOs with competing viewpoints together and, with TV cameras running, had them discuss broad fiscal and economic policy. He lauds Ford's input at the conference, saying he was "attentive and really knowledgeable about all competing positions and how able and insightful and grounded he was in solving the nation's problems.... [T]o see a president, with complete mastery of the issues, looking for solutions, is the key." Bush thinks for a moment and says, "I think I can do that." (Ron Suskind)
- Late May: The revelation that Bush had been warned of the likelihood of an al-Qaeda attack in his August 6, 2001 daily briefing breaks, for a moment, what columnist and author Frank Rich calls the "bipartisan honeymoon" in Washington. House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt demands more information about what the White House knew in the weeks and months before the attacks and when the White House knew it. He is joined by other lawmakers, including Republican senator Richard Shelby. They are promptly smeared as unpatriotic by Dick Cheney, who calls any suggestions that the White House had any advance warning of imminent attacks "incendiary," and says to even ask such questions is "thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war." Cheney's brayings do not stop the revelations of pre-9/11 failures from continuing to come out. (Frank Rich pp.47-8)
